In your Internet travels you may have seen, “Do not feed the trolls” or DNFTT on a blog or discussion board. Who or what are these trolls and why shouldn’t you feed them?
In Internet jargon, a troll is usually someone who posts a controversial (and usually offensive) post or comment just to get a rise out of the author or community. They’re “trolling” for a response. The Internet makes it pretty easy to be anonymous, which brings out some bad behavior in certain people.
“Do not feed the trolls” or DNFTT means that you should not respond to a troll since that’s exactly what they want you to do. Most trolls will move on if they’re not given attention, but they may also require some moderation (in the form of blocking or removing posts).
Just about any site which gains popularity will see some trolls. The more people you have coming to your site, the bigger the audience for the troll. This isn’t a reason not to encourage comments and conversation. Just be aware that you may also have to spend some time moderating conversations (which is true even with non-trolls). It may help to have community guidelines in place before an incident happens.
Troll hasn’t always had such a negative meaning. There used to be a practice of “trolling for newbies” by encouraging new comers to react to items that experience members knew not to react to. Still probably not a nice thing to do, but it wasn’t as nasty as some of the more recent trolls.
I hope this helps you understand what a troll is in terms of the Internet. For more reading, check out the Wikipedia article.
What’s been your experience with trolls? How do you contain or deal with them?
(photo by kevindooley @ Flickr CC)
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